[W]hen you break a CFL, there's hardly any more mercury in there and we practically have to bring in the hazmat team according to the federal government.

If you read that story closely --

${PERSON} calls local office to ask how to dispose of a broken CFL, and gets ${FLUNKY} who doesn't know how to deal with very small spills and covers her rear by suggesting a full cleanup. ${PERSON} is shocked to hear that CFLs are so dangerous, goes to local media; same government office has saner minds get back to ${PERSON} and specify that no, they don't actually need to have that tiny amount of mercury cleaned up, but at this point they don't believe anything that was said to them...

Short form: It's a sad little story, but it says basically nothing about actual best practices.

I wish you could restrict internet access to specific domains and I also wish you could turn off specific permissions

CyanogenMod does this (allowing specific permissions to be rescinded).

Other people pay income taxes and those taxes as well. The fact remains that close to half of our population pays no income taxes after refunds.

To quote you... so what?

The problem, as I see it, is that "close to half our population" is so poor they don't pay income taxes -- in short, that too much of our middle class has fallen into poverty. If you look at the US's wealth distribution mix, we were at an extremely healthy place in the late 70s and since then it's completely gone to hell -- since 1979 the top 1% have gotten vastly richer (upwards of 120%), the top 20% have gotten somewhat richer (about 25%), and everyone else is poorer -- the bottom 20% by 30%.

You want more people to be a part of the tax base? Let's fix the wealth distribution problem and get back to where we have a healthy and productive middle class.

Certainly there will always be a bottom bracket, but do mind the gap.

Looking at how the wealth concentration ratio matches with middle-class prosperity, and the direction those metrics are going in now, leads to some concerning conclusions.

Once the poor people start doing what the rich people do, they're not so poor anymore. I've watched this play out around me so many times it's nauseating.

Oooh, a just-world theorist.

I've watched an extremely responsible friend lose her job, experience a major medical condition, and have her entire (large) savings evaporate in costs of follow-up care.

I've seen people whose large retirement funds disappeared when the bubble burst, people who had unexpected court cases against them (either criminal or civil), people who developed a disability whose employers found a way to skirt the laws around accommodation (or, in another case, went out of business for unrelated reasons).

Sometimes bad things happen to good people. I'm in a pretty good place myself right now, but "there for but the grace of God go I" is a lesson it's far too easy to learn the hard way.

Except it would be populated by folks who just want to live on welfare because working is hard

Perhaps you don't remember back when Clinton instated a 2-year limit on the amount of time people could spend on welfare without working, and a 5-year lifetime cap?

Blugh. Not the same thing at all, as the TPC paper explains.

...afraid to fix the fucked-up tax code where 46% pay no income tax at all.

Riddle me this, Batman:

What percentage of the total pie of income does that 46% who pay no taxes make?

Answer that, and you'll understand why the people who aren't so upset about that particular factoid see you as the one seeing a distorted world through a "political lens". (As it happens -- the Tax Policy Center, who made the 46% estimate, has a much more level-headed assessment).

Yeah, actually I did. I said "I'll beg _that_ question" (emphasis added) as to "The police _need_ to have encrypted communication." I didn't ask for why that is, did not address whether it's true or not, and proceeded further. That's begging the question.

You argued that the proposed approach would imply a double standard, thus making an implied argument (to a reader who believes double standards to be a Bad Thing) against said proposal.

Given as begging a question is unhelpful and a fallacy, I'd think you'd be grateful for the argument that you did something more helpful, even when mislabeled.

Ok, I'll beg that question.

You neither "beggered" the question (by asking it in a way that suggested an answer, thus depriving it of value -- the traditional definition) nor "raised" the question (which "beg the question" is often misused to mean). WTF?